|
|
 |
| Dr Robert Jay Lifton |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical
Killing and
the
Psychology
of Genocide © |
|
|
| Page
127 |
Back |
|
Contents |
Index |
Home
Page |
|
Forward |
|
| |
| Participants |
| |
to keep the war going and to reverse its outcome, as
destined to restore the glory of Germany. Here S. entered directly into the
romance of combat and death; he recalled proudly his unit's boldness in making
use of patchwork equipment to defeat Communist troops, his brother’s
miraculous escape from execution by the Communists, and his living out the
Freikorps principles (described by one participant) of “war and
adventure, excitement and destruction.” For the young S. the
Freikorps was a profoundly formative experience; and for a leading
historian of the phenomenon, “the real importance of the movement lies in
... that brutality of spirit and in that exaltation of power which the men of
the Free Corps bequeathed to the Third Reich.”39
S. thought that the First World War
experience "made a people of us," and that Germany had not been
“militarily . . . defeated” but undermined by “strikes in
the munitions plants.” This was a version of the widely accepted
right-wing “stab in the back“ (Dolchstoss) theory of the First
World War: Germany had been not defeated but betrayed — by leftists,
Communists, non-Germans, and, above all, Jews. Over the course of his
university and medical studies, S. took on the contours of an intellectual of
the radical right, both élite and populist, scornful of the Weimar
Republic (“We said, ‘This mess has to be replaced by something
completely different’ ”); reading Spengler and responding to his (in
the words of a recent commentator) “celebration ... of a national and
racial soul that contrasts with a rootless international finance . . .
locat[ed] . . . in the alien body of the soul of the Jews.”40 S. was also “greatly influenced” in
his “historical views” by Houston Stuart Chamberlain, the Englishman
who, early in the twentieth century, became a naturalized German citizen and
married Richard Wagner’s daughter Eva. Chamberlain wrote in German and his
racist theory of history presents members of the Germanic (Nordic) race
“as saviors of mankind” in a death struggle that “would decide
whether the base Jewish spirit would triumph over the Aryan soul and drag the
world down with it.”41 S. was part of a
new nationalism, stressing the “community of blood” and the mystical
transcendence of the “front experience” of combat in the First World
War (in Ernst Jünger’s words, “The last war, our war, the
greatest and most powerful event of this era ... [because] in it the genius of
war permeated the spirit of progress . . . [and] the growing transformation of
life into energy).” 42 *
During
his student days, Johann S. followed a family tradition in becoming active in
the national Burschenschaften, or student corporations, which he
associated with deep Germanic roots and with völkisch princi-
[…ples] |
__________
* Jünger was the
leading literary representative of the “front generation” and its
“inner experience” of the trenches during the First World War. As a
talented novelist and essayist, he “probably undermined the Weimar
Republic more effectively than any other single author and helped foster a
mental climate in which Nazism could flourish.” He resisted joining the
Party, however, and, after military experience in the Second World War,
produced diaries “disdainful of the Nazi spirit to which he had once made
no trifling contribution.” 43
|
|
| |
THE NAZI DOCTORS:
Medical Killing and the
Psychology of
Genocide
Robert J. Lifton
ISBN 0-465-09094
©
1986 |
|
Back |
Page 127 |
Forward |
|
|
